:vegan-liberation:
Welcome to /c/vegan and congratulations on your first steps toward overcoming liberalism and ascending to true leftist moral superiority.
Rules
No plant-based diet bullshit or promotion of plant-based capitalism. Veganism isn't about you, it's about historical materialist anti-speciesism, anti-racist animalization, and animal liberation. Ethical vegans only.No omni apologists or carnists. Babystepping is for libs, and we're not here to pat you on the back. Good faith questions and debate about how to fight for animal liberation are allowed.No advocating violence to any species for any reason. If you think this is negotiable GTFO. This includes but is not limited to animal testing, slaughter, and mass euthanasia. Anything that promotes speciesism or the commodification of animals will be removed.Use Content Warnings and NSFW tags for triggering content.
Especially if a comrade requests it.Questions about diet belong in c/food. It's also a great place to share recipes.In all sections of the site, you must follow the Hexbear.net Code of Conduct.Resources
Animal liberation and direct action
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Vegan 101 & FAQs
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Take B12. :vegan-edge:
I understand the thought process, but I don't think carnism is based on "They're too weak to stop me". Nobody's calling for the consumption of orphan children.
Just as you might not eat an animal due to e.g. its capacity for suffering. A carnist wouldn't eat you due to your being a human. These are both material barriers.
Nobody's calling for the consumption of orphan children.
Not the literal consumption of them as food, no, but there are plenty of people willing to exploit them.
I understand the thought process, but I don't think carnism is based on "They're too weak to stop me"
Not OP, but I don't think he's saying carnism is "based" on that presupposition, rather it is ultimately the justification that allows for the objectification of something that undeniably possesses sentience. It is the point of failure in the supposed reasoning that most carnists would use as their rationale for not doing to humans what they readily do to animals.
Just as you might not eat an animal due to e.g. its capacity for suffering. A carnist wouldn't eat you due to your being a human.
But that's just it. Why did you change the second sentence to "a carnist wouldn't eat you due to your being a human" rather than stick with the reason you gave for a vegan not eating an animal? Yeah, a vegan wouldn't eat an animal due to that animal's capacity for suffering, but so too, a carnist wouldn't eat a human due to their recognized capacity for suffering.. The fact that you further distanced the carnist from the root of the issue as you already stated it (empathy - the recognition of a capacity for suffering) by making it about "being human" is very telling. Why should the humanness matter? Ultimately it's because (or it should be - it's what most would claim is because) we empathize with other humans - we recognize their capacity for suffering. What is it about an lifeform being human that stops we modern people from thinking it's ok to objectify humans to the extent that we would be ok with slaughtering them because they taste good? Empathy - the recognition of their capacity to suffer as we ourselves do. But many non-human animals who carnists still are ok slaughtering because they taste good have that capacity to suffer too, and that is where the carnist's disconnect in their stated reasoning occurs, that is where BeanisBrain is pointing out that the carnist is failing to live by the thing that they (and generally we as a society) claim is what matters when it comes to other humans - as a human I know other humans suffer. We are now at a point scientifically, philosophically where we can say with the same certainty as the previous statement that as a mammal I know other mammals suffer. So carnists have to come up with other excuses, often telling themselves the lie that these non-humans don't suffer, but it is too obvious of a lie that they don't on some level recognize it as such, so doing so reveals that ultimately, it is not actually their empathy that keeps them from harming other humans, because that empathy fails when it comes to creatures that don't lack the capacity for suffering but only DO lack the capacity to stop the carnists from objectifying them, ignoring their suffering, and slaughtering them because they taste good. I'm really tired, inebriated and I know I've been repetitive and less than perfectly cogent, but I really hope some of this has been enough to shine some light on how your comment is really proving OP u/BeanisBrain's point.
Nobody's calling for the consumption of orphan children.
u/tomenzgg beat me to it, but apparently you haven't read A Modest Proposal.
u/tomenzgg beat me to it, but apparently you haven't read A Modest Proposal.
I just want to reply to this part specifically. A Modest Proposal wasn't actually calling to eat orphan children, it was satire based on the fact that calling to eat orphan children (actually, it was the children of poor people) would be shocking and repulsive to any reader. I don't know if that was what you were actually saying, but I think it is important that AFAIK no one at the time was unironically calling to eat orphan children. Of course, as part of that satire Swift did liken the Irish to livestock, which is something that plenty of colonizers have unironically said of the colonized. It just wasn't the case in the particular case of that essay.
Hexbears Understand Satire Challenge: Impossible
I don't know what this means but I will interpret it in bad faith and get upset at you for insulting me
I don't know what this means but I will interpret it in bad faith and get upset at you for insulting me
hexbear_struggle_session.png /joke
I was making a reference to Disco Elysium because your post reminded me of the checks you have to roll in the game
Ohh yeah thanks for explaining. I figured it was a "critical failure" joke, I just couldn't help myself making a sarcastic meta-comment about our favorite shitposting website. 
I feel your struggle comrade, I didn't have anything better than two dice either 
It was a joke. I know exactly what A Modest Proposal was written to be, @LeninWeave@hexbear.net. It was a way to end a heavier comment with a lighthearted poke. Hexbears Understand Satire Challenge: Impossible, indeed, juniper, but I'm not the one who failed that challenge here.
We're all having fun here, get over yourself.
But actually, they aren't okay.
The people who actually do this grisly work for a living face the same kinds of traumatic stress symptoms as any soldier or torturer would. They do have empathy for non-human animals and it eats them alive. They have to fight themselves constantly to overcome the barriers that prevent us from hurting and killing and mutilating others. That's why the people coerced to work in this industry consistently face higher rates of depression, self-harm, addiction/overdose, every violent crime you can think of, and suicide.
The vast majority of carnists have never killed anything bigger than a cockroach. They get neat little packages of decontextualized red goop on the store shelves and don't have to spend even a second thinking about the suffering that went into making it.
a carnist wouldn't eat a human due to their recognized capacity for suffering
I disagree with this assertion, at least for a large swathe of carnists. Yes, a meaningful amount of carnists live in denial by saying animals can't suffer or other excuses. But a good percentage are consciously well aware that animals suffer.
So I don't think my comment does prove the point. I'm trying to say that the moral basis of "don't needlessly kill beings that can suffer" is not the basis that many/most carnists are working with, but instead simply default to "don't needlessly kill human beings". And I think there's significantly more reason and complexity behind the basis of "don't kill human beings" (or animals, actually) than simply realising their capacity to suffer.
Big opportunity here to take a leaf out of those classic anti-piracy ads.
You wouldn't EAT a human
You wouldn't EAT a monkey
You wouldn't EAT a cat
Well, there was always that Jonathan Swift fellow.
If you're going for a Marxist analysis of carnism then you have to begin with relations of production. To start, animal agriculture turns an animal into a commodity. You can see from there why the indifference would arise.
I'm going to first qualify all of this by saying I've eaten an all vegan diet for long stretchs before and I believe veganism the morally correct position. Due to COVID and allergic reactions I didn't understand I've also had times where I've eaten a 100% carnivorous all meat diet. I swear to God eating the all meat diet after eating vegan was like microdosing a drug that heightened my predators instincts. Maybe it was because I was so sick at the time but I truly felt like eating all meat reduced my empathy and control over antisocial impulses.
I think your existential distrust is well placed. Something goes wrong in the brain when you feed it so much meat, just my opinion and observations